The Berlin Wall of the Mind
I'm looking over the wall and they're looking at me.
I live not far from the Imperial War Museum which, appropriately, is housed in a former lunatic asylum. The park in which it stands is known colloquially as, 'Bedlam Park' (formally, 'Mary Geraldine Harmsworth Park'). To the left of the museum's entrance stands a section of the Berlin Wall. Around the other side of the building, standing alone, is the brutally simple Soviet War Memorial, commemorating 27 million Russians who died defeating fascism in the Great Victory of World War II.
I was working at MTV in Camden Town when the Wall came down. American corporate dudes had been in Berlin at the crucial moment and they gathered us together and presented each of us with a small chunk of spray-painted concrete on cotton wool in a perspex box. I gave my piece of the Wall to my niece, who had just been born, as a Christening present. She recently turned 35 and has a one year old daughter who will be unable to conceive of the significance of the Wall to my generation, growing up with David Bowie crooning, Heroes, and The Sex Pistols snarling about Holidays In The Sun.
My niece's godmother is married to a senior Naval Officer. We met for the first time at the christening and have encountered one another at key moments as she grew up. In 1990, this cove was Captain of a frigate on a trade mission to Africa. "Join the navy to see the world, sail to third world dictatorships and sell them weapons", I quipped, provocatively. He was also a trained Apache helicopter pilot and was taken aback by my knowledge of its weapons systems. We are talking about the days when fire and forget was state of the art.
Back then, before Desert Storm, my interest in military technology had been piqued by a friend who’d been raised by peaceniks around Greenham Common campsites and so, naturally, was fascinated by Warporn; by miltech and the mindset that informs it. He got me into it and I, too, became a War Head, a connoisseur of the literature and its lingo. They like to disguise the lethality of their weaponry in cute acronyms, ATACMS being a current example.
My interest was stoked by living so close to the IWM and accessing its library, which is in the building's dome. I'd make an appointment every few months and be taken up in a lift to peruse the latest issues of Janes and any other defence journals that may have been donated.
My last encounter with my niece's godmother's spouse, now retired from active service, was after her wedding, when the conflict in Ukraine was about four months old. My behaviour at the reception may have been inappropriate, but I'd quaffed a couple of flutes of fizz on an empty stomach.
I approached him with a glint in my eye, observing that the proxy war was taking rather longer than one might have anticipated. His response was that, so far as he was concerned, it was all going to plan. A plan, that is, which had been in place since 2015 when NATO started training the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU). His final posting had been within the Ministry of Defence, so this cove was fully in on it.
That plan, as revealed by Angela Merkel and later confirmed by François Hollande, was not to implement the negotiated peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine over the security of the breakaway republics in the Donbass, the Minsk Accords, but to procrastinate, giving NATO time to train the AFU to fight the inevitable conflict with Russia. Now, their Ukrainian proxies are paying their buthcher’s bill, doing the killing and dying on their behalf, and all NATO need do is supply the wunderwaffe, the marvellous superweapon that will get the job of defeating Putin done.
On the subject of game-changing weaponry, I informed my ex-MoD interlocutor that the end result of the Special Military Operation (SMO) - don't call it a war! - was a foregone conclusion, because the Ruskies have got the best kit. My miltech knowledge had been rusty, but I was by then up to hypersonic speed on the capabilities of the array of wunderwaffe announced by President Putin on 01.03.18, Kinzhal first among them.
The 'Dagger' is an air-launched, precision-guided ballistic missile with a range of around 2,000km - if you include the range of the MiG-31 jet launching it - that travels at more than five times the speed of sound, speeds of up to Mach 10 having been reported. Its velocity makes interception practically impossible and greatly amplifies the impact of the missile, as was demonstrated on 18.03.22, when the Russians stabbed an underground weapons depot at Deliatyn, followed by a fuel depot in Konstantinovka the next day.
While these demonstrations were not widely reported, they were no doubt noticed and informed the peace negotiations being conducted in Isanbul, where a settlement was swiftly agreed. The breakaway Donbass republics could remain Ukrainian, so long as Ukraine stopped attacking ethnic Russians in those oblasts, relinquished its ambition to join NATO and renounced nukes. The agreement was thrashed out, but before it could be finalised, Boris Johnson, then UK Prime Minister, flew in to Kiev to kibosh peace.
At least, that's what Putin and his Foreign Minister, Sergey Labrov, say is what happened. Johnson says they are liars. However Naftali Bennett, who mediated the peace talks and Mevlut Cavusoglu, who hosted, also blame Boris. As do two of the three Ukrainian negotiators (Arestovych is more circumspect).
Boris Johnson is the liars' liar who was obliged to leave government for lying. Boris knows a liar when he spies one and so, when he says they're all lying, we cannot take his word for it. Still, Johnson came to Kiev and peace went away. Subsequently, if not consequently, at least half a million Ukrainians have been killed. No wonder BoJo the bloody bloviator looks haunted.
My man from the MoD comes from a similar patrician milieu to BoJo and has the disdain for Russia that's characteristic of the British ruling class. He scoffed at my suggestion of Russian miltech superiority. The Russian arsenal would soon be depleted, he said. They had no silicon chips and were obliged to cannibalise domestic washing machines for semi-conductors. This suggestion seemed so absurd that, tipsily, I literally laughed out loud.
The notion that the incompetent Russians lack the wherewithal to sustain their operation in Ukraine proved to be a persistent meme in anti-Putin slack talk. It was repeated by Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the EU Commission, at the European Parliament in Strasbourg on 14.09.22. "The Russian military is taking chips from dishwashers and refrigerators to fix their military hardware", she said, "because they ran out of semi-conductors. Russia's industry is in tatters and its economy is on life-support."
Wondering where this daft idea came from, the earliest reference to it I found was by Biden's Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo. CBS News reported, in a pair of congressional hearings on 11.05.22, Ms Raimondo told lawmakers that Russia has been using semiconductors from dishwashers and refrigerators for its military equipment. Her source was anecdotal, from the Ukrainian prime minister, Denys Shmyhal.
That this unverifiable rumour became recycled within NATO is indicative of two things: the Ukrainians' ability to tell tall tales and their allies' willingness to believe any nonsense that fits their narrative. It would be unfair to say that Ukraine and its backers are losing their war with Russia comprehensively. In the field of propaganda they are preeminent and, since the Russians prefer actions to words, largely unchallenged.
Following years of misinformation in the West about 'Russiagate' - predicated upon a bogus dossier made up by a British spy - never mind Novichok, the information war is one the Russians aren't particularly bothering to prosecute. They no longer care what Westerners think of them and they don't believe it makes any difference to what happens on the battlefield. Because of the Western animosity toward Russia and in light of its long-running propaganda war, Russians call the Five Eyes of the Anglosphere, 'the Empire of Lies'.
When the fog of war descends, any impartial truth seeker with a modicum of common sense ceases to take at face value what either side says about the other. The fog is generated by propaganda machines operated by partisan influence peddlers who seek to partition your mind! They don't want you to see over the wall, so the first thing they’ll do is prohibit the opposition's propaganda.
A salient feature of this conflict is the abysmal way it has been covered by Western legacy media and the concurrent rise of alt.media. It's not possible to censor Russian new sources when all that's required to look over the wall is a VPN, but that is not necessary. There are at least half a dozen very well-informed YouTube channels that consistently provide reliable commentary, frequently in the person of Scott Ritter.
Russia Today, Tass or Sputnik may not report the unvarnished truth, but they do tell the Russians' side of the story, soberly, and without preposterous exaggeration. I do not suggest they provide a wholly accurate guide to the War, although official Russian Ministry of Defence bulletins tend to be factually accurate. It's just that they leave out the bad news, such as Russian casualties.
The last official estimate of Russian troop losses in Ukraine was in September 2022, when the MoD reported a running total of 5,937 dead. This was rather more than was acceptable, so they simply stopped giving numbers. Any figures you may have seen since then are speculative, or made up by the Ukrainians. And, likesay, making shit up is what the Ukrainians and their NATO chums do best.
In May, the Kremlin spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, accused the Americans of "pulling figures out of a hat. Washington does not have the opportunity to give any correct figures, they do not have such data”, he said. “It is necessary to focus only on those figures that are published in a timely manner by the Russian Defence Ministry", Peskov added with a straight face, well aware that no such figures would be forthcoming any time soon.
The most accurate tally of dead Russians is collated by Mediazona, an independent media outlet founded a decade ago by the women behind Pussy Riot. In collaboration with BBC News Russian Service and a team of volunteers, Mediazona maintains a named list compiled from verified, publicly available sources. It cannot be completely accurate, as not every military death becomes public knowledge, but at the time of publication it stands at 82,050.
Compare that figure with The New York Times of 10.10.24, in which Eric Schmitt reported, 'More than 600,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded since the war began in 2022'. It is salient that this article was filed from Washington and relies upon an anonymous source who is, allegedly, 'a senior U.S. military official'. It is predicated upon a belief that the Russian 'commanding officers (are) seemingly willing to send many thousands of infantry soldiers to die'.
This is a toxic meme that has persisted since Stalingrad: the Russians don't care about dying, or killing. They don't care about their own lives, the inhuman bastards, so they certainly don't care about the lives of their enemies. The reality is quite to the contrary. The SMO has been so painstakingly slow precisely because the Russians are eager to minimise civilian casualties and to lose as few of their own personnel as possible. The propaganda on their MoD web site focuses upon improving the survival of injured soldiers through prompt medical evacuation from the front lines.
Western politicians and their client media frequently refer to the conflict in Ukraine as, "Putin's unprovoked war", as if President Putin is the irrational King of Russia who woke up one morning, randomly decided to invade the neighbouring state and ordered his compliant generals to make it so. Their image of Putin as a despot who is intent upon reviving the Soviet Union has been a significant factor in NATO's defeat in Ukraine, because its planners have repeatedly tried to provoke irrational responses from the President, who never acts rashly.
I have not the space to rehearse the history and context of this conflict, going back to the Maidan coup a decade ago, or why Putin felt the need to 'de-militarise and de-Nazify' Ukraine, but those facts have been very well explained via channels such as The Duran and interviews with the likes of John Mearsheimer and Jeff Sachs.
The British establishment, however, is not listening and nor are they in Washington. The warmongers of the Anglosphere have their own story about Putin, who cannot be forgiven for taking control of Russia in the late 1990s and kicking out the parasitic Western banksters who were intent upon asset-stripping his country. The imperialist mind set can't conceive of any modus operandi other than force, or any motive apart from greed and so they accuse Putin of being a bully hellbent on pillage.
Their bigoted loathing and contempt for the Russian president is exemplified by Sebastian Gorka, a bogus Brit with a fake posh accent who aspires to lie like Boris Johnson. His presence among Donald Trump's inner circle gives no cause for optimism. Gorka anachronistically describes President Putin as a “KGB thug”. The KGB ceased to exist in 1991, but imbeciles like Gorka are nostalgic for the cast iron certainties of the Cold War.
Back at my niece's wedding reception, I did not have to wind up my man from the UK MoD too far before he snapped and started ranting about Putin being a gangster and Russia being a wasteland. 'A gas station with nuclear weapons', is how his opposite numbers in Washington routinely describe it. What got to him, methinks, was my suggestion that the Russian leader is a righteous Christian soldier, fighting a patriotic battle for the future independence of his country from hegemonic Western forces that had refused to play straight with him.
Like many Russians following the ignominious collapse of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Putin replaced his membership of the Russian Communist party with a profound belief in Christianity, of the Russian Orthodox variety. Which, from the perspective of my man from the MoD - who attended Ampleforth, the Catholic Eton - is the wrong kind of Christianity. That is another reason why the Polish people, for whom Catholicism was a liberating theology, despise Russians.
The impression I formed of Vladimir Putin from watching Oliver Stone's, 'The Putin Interviews' from 2017 is that the Russian president shares similar Christian conservative values to Tucker Carlson, who interviewed him earlier this year. If one goes a bit deeper to peruse a few of Putin's speeches, it's hard not to be impressed by his grip.
Putin is routinely dismissed as a tyrant by politicians from Western 'democracies'. Their thinking is short-term as they are preoccupied with re-election and fulfilling the demands of their sponsors. Whereas Putin's patriotism and his quarter century in power have given him the perspective to plan strategically. One has the impression that the neocon warmongers in Washington believe themselves to be playing a real life version of the board game, Risk. Putin isn’t playing; he is concerned with consequences.
By now it should be clear that Vladimir Putin sees himself as a hero of the stature of Peter the Great (metaphorically speaking; he’s 5’7”). He wants to go down in history as the man who made Russia great again. In this moment of heightened nuclear tension, it is somewhat reassuring to understand that the Russian president is keen for there to be a future in which statues of himself might be erected.
While I cannot ascertain that Putin has ever been accused of being a nice guy, he clearly has more integrity and is infinitely less self-serving than appalling Western politicians like Boris Johnson, or David Lammy, who are so relentlessly critical of the man. It is as if Putin makes these fat, conceited fools feel inadequate. One recalls his response to Johnson's snarky remarks about Putin’s penchant for posing bare-chested in photographs. Drily, Vlad. agreed that it would be best if Boris kept his shirt on.
Boris Johnson is a truly monstrous character who has spent his career hiding behind a contrived personality of bumbling eccentricity that barely conceals ruthless ambition, which has taken him all the way to Downing Street and beyond. Immediately upon leaving office, Johnson went to Washington to deliver an unspecified number of speeches to an audience of banksters who had made out like bandits in Ukraine, for which he was paid $3 million in advance by the Harry Walker speaking agency. No doubt old Boris of the Bullingdon Club’s after dinner stand up routines are worth every penny, what?
Tormented in the night by the ghosts of half a million dead Ukrainians, Boris Johnson looks increasingly haggard and has taken to blurting out the occasional truth. The war in Ukraine, he now admits, is not merely about Ukrainian sovereignty and its freedom to park Western missiles in the territory adjacent to Russia, but has become about defending Western hegemony in the face of BRICS, the trade and mutual aid organisation that’s grown bigger than the G7.
Johnson's latest admission is that NATO is waging a proxy war in Ukraine. Hilariously - if your sense of humour is pitch black - he complained on The Telegraph podcast that, "we’re not giving our proxies the ability to do the job. For years now, we’ve been allowing them to fight with one hand tied behind their backs, and it has been cruel." Cruelty, along with lying, is Johnson's stock-in-trade. His humour is cruel, his treatment of his various wives has been cruel and his heroes are the ultra cruel Azov Battalion.
Questions of morality aside - they are irrelevant in the case of the bloody bloviator - the suggestion that there is some wunderwaffe that will enable the Ukrainians to win this war betrays a profound disconnection from the cold hard reality represented by battle-proven miltech and an apparent inability to decipher the messages Russia has repeatedly delivered in its demonstration of increasingly devastating missiles.
David Lammy is another Boris Johnson. I see them as two ends of the same animal, a graceless Pushmi-Pullyu. Lammy professes to be a man of the people and yet has adopted all the patrician attitudes of the British ruling class, most pertinently including its deep and consuming Russophobia. His story about coming from poverty is a mite disingenuous, considering he was privately educated from the age of eight, matriculated to SOAS and was the first black Briton to study at Harvard before becoming Britain's then-youngest MP in 2000, aged 27. His mentor, Bernie Grant, a Socialist fellow traveller with Jeremy Corbyn, must be roiling in the afterlife.
Coming into a position of power, Lammy and his PM - that wooden bloke with Max Headroom's hairstyle - were as keen as Boris to up the ante and give their "proxies the ability to do the job". To that end the Brits and their French allies in NATO sent scores of Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles to Ukraine. These are the inferior Anglo-French equivalent of the Russian Kalibr cruise missiles which made their debut on 13.03.22, when used to strike the NATO base at Yaroviv.
Storm Shadow/SCALP and the US ATACMS have a range of a couple of hundred kilometres and can reach targets within Russia. For them to do so successfully requires satellite targeting data which is not available to non-NATO states. The AFU can only fire those missiles with the direct participation of NATO technicians. Therefore, President Putin said that he would consider such an escalation to be an act of war by individual NATO states and would respond accordingly.
For that reason, President Biden was initially reluctant to permit long range missiles being fired into Russia. But, since he lost the US Presidential election and in case his successor might withdraw from a futile proxy war in Europe - as Trump’s VP, JD Vance, has advocated - the people who operate Genocide Joe changed his mind.
Just as I was about to publish this article, what seems like a lifetime ago on 20.11.24, Storm Shadows and ATACMS were fired into Russia. For the past three weeks the world has teetered on the edge of mutually assured destruction, Mercury has been retrograde and I have been unable to publish!
Where am I going with this essay, anyway? It's already longer than 3,500 words and bruising up on the gmail length limit, which is surely too baggy for Substack. I've told the reader that I admire Vladimir Putin and despise the Johnson-Lammy beast. I’ve said that the Russians are bound to win in Ukraine because they've got better miltech. What more is there?
I know my posts will have to be more frequent and concise if I want to monetise this Substack eventually and derive an income from it, as I’ve assured my Work Coach is feasible. I will, but I also want to drone on for a few more words while we await the promised Russian response to the latest ATACMS strike on 12.12.24.
I'm compromising by drawing a line here, inserting a divider, and shall schedule the story in whatever shape it’s in, to post on Substack on Sunday, when Mercury stations direct and the moon is full. Below this line, I'll discuss Oreshnik, mention Avangard and Sarmat, predict when the conflict in Ukraine will end and finish with some musings on the purpose of this Substack and its direction as we plunge into the Age of Aquarius. Are you with me?
What happened on 21.11.24 took everyone by surprise. War Heads had wondered whether Russia would lose patience and finally wipe Kiev off the map with an Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle. One of Putin's six wunderwaffe announced in 2018, Avangard has never been used in anger and there are no pictures of it, so perhaps the conceited Angloshperical warpigs, blinded by hubris, thought it doesn't exist. Apparently, they were prepared to fuck around and find out.
But the Russians used another missile instead, one that nobody knew anything about, to completely destroy a Soviet era weapons factory in Ukraine that was built to withstand a nuclear blast, reducing it to dust. What's more, they did so without using a nuke, or any kind of explosive, but relied solely upon the kinetic energy of the dummy warheads impacting at many times the speed of sound to penetrate the deep bunker complex underneath the Yuzhmash industrial plant in Dnipropetrovsk.
Oreshnik, the 'hazelnut', is an intermediate range ballistic missile, of a class that was abolished in 1987 when Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF treaty, which kept Europe comparatively safe until President Trump unilaterally cancelled it. The Russians had been complaining about their neighbour, Ukraine, being brought in to NATO because they don't want nuclear weapons in the adjacent country and then the de facto boss of NATO brought back intermediate missiles. What did they imagine the Russian response might be?
Oreshnik is an unstoppable conventional missile with multiple warheads that has the power of a nuke, only it can be more precisely targeted and doesn't set up a blast wave, produce radioactive fallout or create a nuclear winter. No Storm Shadow missiles have been used since 21.11.24, which may indicate that NATO intelligence was paying attention. Or it might be because the Storm Shadow missiles donated to Ukraine were all stored in the supposedly impregnable Yuzhmash bunker, where underground explosions continued for three hours after the Oreshnik strike.
The three ex-US military analysts who inform Judge Andrew Napolitano and the audience of his Judging Freedom YouTube channel, which has gained half a million subscribers in a year, each described Oreshnik as a "game changer", the very definition of wunderwaffe. David Lammy's boss, not so easily impressed, said it was a sign of Putin's desperation. President Putin himself kindly said, since there is no defence against Oreshnik, due notice will be given if and when it is used again. Which, given the obdurate reaction of Western leaders and continued use of US-supplied ATACMS, seems all too likely.
What makes this moment especially perilous is the absence of back channels. During the Cuban missile crisis, the two sides talked each other down. But Anthony Blinken, in his role as Uncle Satan, severed comms in 2022. Now, the lame duck Biden administration, determined to cause bigger problems for team Trump, has gone rogue. When Sergey Lavrov told Tucker that there are sensible people in the US government who will have got the message sent by Oreshnik, he may have been over optimistic.
The ATACMS kept coming so, as Larry Johnson told Judge Napolitano, the message had to be spelled out in a phone call between General Gerasimov, the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, and Charlie Brown, the USAAF general who serves as the 21st chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What was said on 27.11.24 is a matter of speculation, but no more missiles were fired into Russia for a fortnight. But then, on 12.12.24, half a dozen ATACMS were used to attack an 'aviation facility' at Taganrog, 100 miles inside Russia's southern Rostov region.
It serves no military purpose to test Russian ground defences with long range missiles in this way, unless the intention is to provoke the promised response. The US is beyond intermediate range, so the callow Risk players in Washington who authorised this attack don't have to worry about an Oreshnik coming through their ceiling. Asked about Moscow’s reaction, Dmitry Peskov said: "I would like to remind you of the absolutely unambiguous and direct statement of the Russian Defence Ministry that was made yesterday, which clearly stated that a response will follow." It's the way he tells 'em.
No notice has been given of another Oreshnik strike, so we may assume that the response will be limited to the massive attack upon Ukraine's energy infrastructure in all parts of the country on Friday the 13th that, according to Ukraine’s state-run energy company, Ukrenergo, left 50% of the population without power. Rather than make any further grand gestures, secure in the knowledge that all it need do is hold tight to its winning position, the Kremlin's response to defiant provocation from the AFU is to squeeze harder.
How the SMO will end eventually was a forgone conclusion from its outset: the objectives of de-militarisation and de-Nazification must be achieved because, for Russia, these are existential issues. The latter depends upon the former which, it transpires, has meant de-militarising NATO. As the SMO wore on, the Russians have demonstrated their superiority in every area of the battlefield except info, which, Brian Berletic contends, is a problem "because the US, still to this day, their super weapon is controlling Global Information space".
In that space, perceptions of how the war is going in Ukraine are contrary to the reality on the ground. NATO stockpiles of munitions are nearly exhausted while Russia's industrial war machine is running at full throttle. However cagey Ukraine has been about the true extent of the casualties its military forces have taken, there is no question that they are running out of cannon fodder. Videos abound of young men being press-ganged. Now, Uncle Satan, Anthony Blinken, has decreed that his puppet, Zelensky, must lower the age of compulsory conscription to 18.
Demonic globalist parasites don't care how many Ukrainians are killed. What they care about, as Lindsey Graham brazenly declared, is the rare minerals in the rich black earth of Europe's breadbasket, great swathes of which have been sold off to pay for the weapons the people who are buying that land are selling to Ukraine, which is less like a country than an open cash machine for the most despicable people on the planet.
While the AFU disintegrates and the political leaders of European NATO countries confer about how they can possibly keep the war in Ukraine going in the unlikely event that Donald Trump is as good as his word and ends the fighting, the Russian army is growing bigger and stronger. The sacrifice of Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, following a last minute meeting in Moscow, was not only a humiliation for Putin, but an act of strategic consolidation. If there is to be a protracted ground war in Europe, then the Russians are preparing to fight it.
Whether it will come to that, I can't say. Having predicted the eventual outcome of Putin's Special Military Operation in Ukraine, I don't know if it will begin to be resolved before Trump takes office. The longer it grinds on, the more territory Ukraine will eventually concede. The Russians have drawn their new border with Ukraine along the Dneiper river. They may now take back Odessa and leave what's left of Ukraine, owned by BlackRock, land-locked.
The conflict in Ukraine will only be resolved when NATO military planners look over the Berlin Wall they've erected in their minds and realise that Russia cannot be beaten, militarily, because they've got the best kit. Their missiles are hypersonic and ours aren't. They have just demonstrated a new missile with the destructive force of a nuke, but without the fall out. As Putin said - I paraphrase - eventually his enemies will develop similar miltech, but until then, be in no doubt about who currently leads the wunderwaffe race and who, therefore, is winning the geopolitical game of real life Risk.
A week after the first use of Oreshnik, I visited an old friend who subscribes to the print edition of The Guardian and has Radio 4 on constantly in the background. We fell out and did not speak for years, but life is too short. In reviving our friendship, certain conversational no-go areas were established.
We exchanged family news. Another of my nieces has given birth to another daughter. It's all girls in our family. My great-nieces have been born at a pivotal moment in history and will grow up into a very different world. A multi-polar world in which much more of the important thinking will likely be conducted in cyrillic or kanji, as opposed to Times New Roman. The birth of this new world shall be the subject matter of this Substack.
As we chatted, the news came on. It was at a volume beneath my hearing, but my mate was attuned. "Give 'em the missiles, that's what I say", he said, apropos of an out-of-earshot news item.
I looked askance? "They've lost ever so many soldiers, you know", he said, "the Russians. Hundreds of thousands. That's why he's had to call in his mates from North Korea."
"North Korea?", I queried.
"There's 10,000 North Korean troops trapped in Kursk because the Russians don't want to do their own dying", my friend informed me, confident in the misinformation his media feeds him. He must be aware that Russia shares a border with North Korea, a country that was formed in response to US military aggression. The two nation states are allied and Korean troops regularly train with the Russians. As to how many of them are dying in Kursk, that is a moot question, but the most likely figure is zero.
"Putin must be pretty desperate?" I suggested, not seriously. My friend nodded, gravely. "He is totally fucked", he told me.